In our latest monthly update from the Guggenheim UBS MAP Global Art Initiative, we share details on upcoming MAP artist exhibitions; explore a new Perspectives essay on art in the Arab world; and take a look at the Armory Show’s approaching Focus presentation.

Report number eight from Pablo Léon de la Barra’s research trips across Latin America documents visits made by the Guggenheim UBS MAP Curator, Latin America, to three locales in Ecuador: Guayaquil, the nation’s largest city and home to many tropical modernist buildings; Quito, the capital; and Cuenca, known as Ecuador’s cultural city.

Clockwise from left: Tour given by June Yap during the media preview for No Country: Contemporary Art for South and Southeast Asiac at the NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore, May 2014; Mind’s Eye Tour of Under the Same Sun: Art from Latin America Today, July 2014. Photo: Filip Wolak; installation view, No Country: Contemporary Art for South and Southeast Asia, Asia Society Hong Kong Center, October 30, 2013–February 16, 2014; installation view, Under the Same Sun: Art from Latin America Today, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, June 13–October 1, 2014. Photo: David Heald

A look back over the past few years of the diverse and wide-ranging Guggenheim UBS MAP Global Art Initiative.

Mass protest against high levels of insecurity and violence in the country. Photo: Ramon Lepage

“Welcome to Caracas, modern oil capital rife with inequality, and regional center for social experimentation.” Artist Alexander Apóstol is your guide to the fraught, politicized history and precarious current state of the city’s art institutions.

Salwa Mikdadi’s historically informed account of contemporary art in the Arab world reveals how the past decade has seen new forms of creative practice emerge, contributing to the political and social empowerment of local communities.

In a letter addressed to MAP curator Pablo León de la Barra, Max Jorge Hinderer Cruz recalls something that happened while he was in the company of Bolivian artist María Galindo, an incident that prompted him to reconsider the idea of visibility in relation to the country’s contemporary art scene.

Artist and writer Syd Krochmalny provides a detailed account of the complex experimental oeuvre of iconoclastic Buenos Aires-born conceptual artist Roberto Jacoby, a body of work in which “life and art function as a continuum.”